The sketchy brushwork in dots and short strokes of Impressionism gives way to broad dashes of paint applied as if in a fit of rage.
Brushstrokes did not pretend to be anything but dashes of paint, thus conveying their coloured message without any disguise or effect at individual illusion.
In And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day, most of the action is in the upper half, the paint scurrying and gathering towards the right, while down below a couple of dozen dashes of paint leap and tumble across empty space.
(Interestingly, across the Charles River in Cambridge, an Anglophilic Ruskinite contingent held sway: Harvard professor Charles Herbert Moore berated Hunt and Millet in the Boston papers, calling Millet's work "loose and meaningless dashes of paint", in a vitriolic attack reminiscent of that by Ruskin upon Whistler, which resulted in the celebrated trial in London in 1878).
There, you can see things like the way Impressionists combine dabs and dashes of paint to form an image that becomes clearer as you step back, or uncover hidden items like a hidden signature.
One in particular that stands out is a painted and hand-stitched tarpaulin, with symbols, initials (including one of the artist's grandfathers, Alex Cole) and dashes of paint that provide a literal backdrop for a platform displaying a life-size stuffed alligator staking out its aesthetic territory smack dab in the center of the oversized assemblage.
Among the highlights are Stephanie Bloom's "Who Goes There," a small abstract gouache in which a knot of snakelike shapes implies an unsolved problem; "The Lily Pond," Evelyn Kandel's shadow-box collage of handmade paper that invites the eye to probe the water's depths; and Margaret Owen's "Blue Mountains," a stylized landscape festooned with lively dots and dashes of metallic paint.
Ms. Shirey marks her tools with a dash of purple spray paint, so everyone knows whose toolbox they belong in.
With a dash of powder and paint, a chauffeur becomes a mogul, and a street sweeper an angel.
Toying with perceptions of reality and the imaginary world, Rivory turns plain black and white images into perfectly accented dreamscapes, with just a dash of carefully placed paint.
